So a funny thing happened to me on the way to this column, and that’s why this isn’t in the usual format for my Read essays.
I’d picked up Seven Blades in Black in an independent bookstore back in 2019 and it had been sitting on my pile of “fantasy books big enough to double as doorstops” for a while.
I finally got around in the last two months to reading it in an off-and-on kind of way and eventually finished it. This morning, I thought to myself, eh, let’s use that as today’s Read book, because I have some things to say.
Here’s what I was going to say. On one hand, Seven Blades in Black is an interesting example of how influence operates in genre writing, how previous works become stylistic, thematic or narrative templates. Fantasy readers of a certain generation are all familiar with how Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings informed much subsequent writing, whether in directly derivative works like Terry Brooks Shannara series or more generally—and in some sense spurred other writers like China Mieville, George R.R. Martin, and Philip Pullman to write deliberately against Tolkien. In the case of Seven Blades in Black, the influence I could see runs through a different lineage—sort of Glen Cook’s Black Company novels down through Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law. I’m not plugged in enough to know whether that’s been given a name as a subgenre, but you can see it pretty readily: tough, bitter, cynical protagonists operating in a morally bleak world. Sort of a spaghetti western version of high fantasy. Sometimes that kind of influence produces really good subsequent work over a wide range, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, I thought: ok? But coloring too furiously within those tonal lines, with too much calculation about doing so, without enough thematic or stylistic independence. The kind of thing where you can see the craftwork being done as you go along in a way that keeps you from really getting into the fiction itself.
What I was more struck by was that the book provides yet another case for discussing the long and complicated history of male writers creating a female protagonist in a first-person narrated novel. Any time I’ve taught fiction in my history courses, where I usually mean to use it as an alternative route into thinking about a specific time and place, if I assign a novel that has a first-person perspective of a woman and it’s written by a man, I know where the discussion is going. And rightfully so, because a lot of those works fail in those terms, whatever else they do right. Seven Blades in Black seemed to me another one of those failures, in a way that really grated on me over time. I used the word “calculated” above, and here it felt all the more so: the protagonist is a hard-bitten, cynical, profane, hard-drinking badass with a magical gun and a killer bird for a mount, out for vengeance against former comrades. She’s got a teeny bit of a heart of gold underneath the gruffness, of course. And she’s in an on-again off-again single-sex relationship with her scientist/sorcerer girlfriend.
I couldn’t tell whether she was a character or the result of a focus group meeting, to be honest. It felt to me like this is what a male fantasy writer who is trying to keep up with the genre’s new openness to queer and/or non-Western themes and characters would decide to do, which is write a character who would have been male ten years ago and reconfigure him as a lesbian to try and stay with the trends. It felt like Kate Beaton’s great riff on “strong female characters”.
It doesn’t help that that the book is structured around an extended framing device that long overstays its welcome—the tough protagonist sassing a supposedly merciless (also female) interrogator and unspooling her story to the impatient questioner who has promised to execute her prisoner when the story is done. The questioner is in that sense suspension-of-disbelief-breaking tolerant about the protagonist telling a digressive, expressive story that takes a long time to get to what they want to know—this is not a prince taking delight in listening to Scheherazade’s stories.
I didn’t hate the book, but I didn’t like it much either. There’s some decent world-building, some good thinking about magic, some decent action. But that’s where I was going to end up: nice try but nope.
As I was scribbing out these thoughts, I said to myself, “You know, you’d better not assume that ‘Sam Sykes’ is a man—look up the author”. I follow a lot of social media conversations but for the most part I don’t keep track of social media discussions of SF and fantasy on various platforms, despite the amount of genre fiction I consume and despite the fact that I’m actually writing something about the relationship between fantasy as a genre and historical thought. Maybe because I’m doing that, I feel the need to get my thoughts clear and to stay focused on the work and on a narrow band of relevant scholarship about it, which social media doesn’t help with a lot of the time.
So I looked up the author and: yes, he’s a male-identifying writer. But I went to his blog and there’s one of those #MeToo-connected apologies up at his blog dated to July 2020 (and no subsequent entries). Well. So I do a bit of digging and yeah, there’s a set of accusations of misconduct at conventions and over social media. The author apparently quit Twitter, deleted the account, and has rejoined (and damn, does he tweet a lot now) with no subsequent discussion of earlier transgressions.
So that’s complicated. Not that his behavior is in a “grey zone”, or the critical reaction to it is unfair. That’s not complicated, just that there’s a question of whether I should publish something about a book that I didn’t like much that turns out to have this completely different issue lurking behind it, especially given that the issue I had with the book centers on my feeling that it’s not successful in gendered terms. I swear I came to that view before knowing anything else…and I’m disinclined to get into a conversation about whether the author’s behavior has anything to do with it, because I think some male authors fail at writing female protagonists without those authors having any kind of issue or problem in their everyday life. So where I settled is this. I had already come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a series I wanted to continue with, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone regardless. But I do think the problems I had with the book itself are relevant to a larger range of issues with fiction (genre and otherwise), so I decided to go ahead and push this out.
Image credit: A small excerpt of “Chivalry Is For the Weak” from Kate Beaton’s Hark A Vagrant.
Good. There are a lot of unpublished, good writers out there who can do this work better. Let them have a chance.
Sure, Tim. I agree with this. Some men have written great female characters (Thomas Hardy, for instance), but mostly...meh. And this sounds like the more egregious of the lot. I happen to love some old school fantasy/sci fi that was written by men and which featured strong female protagonists. Your review was enough for me to think that this one is never ending up even in my virtual bookshelves. Not supporting this guy, in particular.